Bombardier has lost a significant amount of money on its streetcar contract with the TTC, and the corporation initially underestimated the work required to fill the $1-billion order, according to company executives.Lee Sander, president of Bombardier Transportation’s Americas division, and David Van der Wee, chief operating officer for the division, made the admission when they spoke at a meeting of the TTC board Thursday. Sander said that after earlier delays, the company is now on track to meet the final deadline of supplying all 204 cars by the end of 2019.But he conceded the project has been more complicated and costly than initially predicted.Van der Wee acknowledged that, when the company bid on the streetcar contract more than a decade ago, it believed it would be relatively simple to take the Flexity-model streetcars it had years of experience building for cities in Europe and deploy them in Toronto. It turned out the vehicle required significant revisions to adapt to Toronto’s environment, including making some components out of a different type of steel that could resist corrosion caused by the city’s winter salting and other factors. The cars also had to be re-engineered to fit the unique turn radii, grades, and track gauge of the TTC’s century-old streetcar network. Perhaps most significantly, Bombardier had to “North Americanize” the production process for the streetcars, including shifting vital welding work to Mexico from the German facilities where the company had built Flexity cars for almost two decades.“The magnitude of that (work) was, I think, underestimated. And I think that is one of the core issues why the startup of this project was so difficult and so challenging,” said Van der Wee, who has been COO since 2017.Sander added that “Bombardier has lost a significant amount of money from this project” and, in retrospect, it underbid on the work.“We, too, in hindsight would hav ...
|
